Books: Importance of Beating Ernest

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THAT SUMMER IN PARIS (255 pp.)—Morley Callaghan—Coward-McCann ($5). -

Paris may no longer be the place good Americans go when they die, but to a dwindling group of American men of letters it still looks like the heaven that lay about them in their infancy.

That Paris was not the city at large but that part of it where The Sun Also rose from, a few streets and cafes in St.-Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse, where every Tom, Scott and Ezra thought of himself as a man of genius, and in some cases was. Morley Callaghan, Canadian novelist, is one of those who have survived to tell how they once saw Ernest plain.

From the outset, one must get the cast straight. "Look at it this way," Callaghan pleads. "Scott didn't like McAlmon. McAlmon no longer liked Hemingway. Hemingway had turned against Scott. I had turned up my nose at Ford. Hemingway liked Joyce. Joyce liked McAlmon."

Before dismissing the whole thing as a sort of Study in Status-Motivated Behavior Within a Peer Group, the reader needs to remind himself that these people are among the greatest names in modern literature (though Ford Madox Ford and Robert McAlmon are no longer big beaks in the literary pecking hierarchy).

Morley became a member of the peer group in 1929 after his short stories had been published in McAlmon's This Quarter, and he had followed all agog from Toronto in its imperceptible wake. Soon. Morley was able to match anyone in the regional game of literary oneupmanship, and he knew who was meant when some one mentioned Eliot.* He proudly recalls the day he put in their places a couple of young squirts who thought they were In because they could recognize Hemingway in the streets. They thought a little man who followed Hemingway carrying a bag was his butler. "No, that's Miró," Morley said quietly. "Miró! The Spanish painter," they squeaked, and slunk away abashed.

The bag, moreover, contained Hemingway's boxing gloves and the clue to why Morley could sit in a cafe with Ernest when Scott could not. Hemingway was hooked on boxing; he was so self-deluded about it that he told a friend, "My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything." Though he was seven years older, he had known Morley back when they were both reporters on the Toronto Star. He and Morley, a competent amateur middleweight, liked to box together. It was as simple as that, but Scott felt "pushed aside and not needed." One fatal day he wangled himself in as timekeeper at one of the regular Hemingway-Callaghan bouts. The trouble lay with Scott—so bemused by literary hero worship that he forgot to call time. Hemingway was getting badly marked up by the "Toronto Kid," and the round ran four minutes.

"All right, Scott," Ernest said savagely. "If you want to see me getting the [obscenity] knocked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake."

That's about all there was to the event, but it is mercilessly hashed over in the book like the long count in the Dempsey-Tunney championship. One way or another, it was the end of a touchy friendship.